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Review

The common view of Quentin Tarantino as a sicko gore freak (largely due to the ear-slicing scene in Reservoir Dogs, geysers of blood in Kill Bill, and sundry splashy slo-mo dismemberments-via-automobile in Death Proof)
overlooks his real gift, which is for long and fraught and winding
dialogues before the carnage erupts. Watching his World War II action
thriller Inglourious Basterds [sic], you might wish
the blood would never come: The payoffs are common, but the foreplay is
killer. Even more than his other genre mash-ups, this is a switchback
journey through Tarantino’s twisted inner landscape, where cinema and
history, misogyny and feminism, sadism and romanticism collide and
split and re-bond in bizarre new hybrids. The movie is an ungainly
pastiche, yet on some wacked-out Jungian level it’s all of a piece.

The movie centers—no, that’s wrong, it has no center, it’s all over the damn map—it features
a squad of American Jews in German-occupied France led by non-Jewish,
part-Apache Southerner Aldo Raine, played by Brad Pitt puffing out his
jaw to look (in his dreams) like Marlon Brando. “The Basterds” are
famous throughout the Third Reich for scalping and/or bludgeoning
Nazis. Of course, it never happened: It’s an unabashed wet dream of
vengeance. Yet watching Raine grill a kneeling commandant astride
scalped Nazis while a nearby Jew (filmmaker Eli Roth) with a baseball
bat takes scary practice swings, you so wish it had. What’s not to love?

The interrogation (and brain-bashing) is a much-needed emotional release following the overture, which grounds Inglourious Basterds
in the real world—at least through the prism of cinema. To the twang of
Ennio Morricone spaghetti Western music (appropriated, like most of the
score, from another film), a French farmer watches a jeep filled with
Nazis travel the road to his house, close-ups of his anxious face
alternating with long shots of the vehicle coming nearer and nearer,
his eyes meeting those of his three terrified daughters—the sequence
comparing favorably to both Leone and Hitchcock. What follows is an
unnervingly polite interrogation over a kitchen table by Nazi
Jew-hunter Hans Landa, played by the elegant and insinuating Christoph
Waltz. As the camera begins to circle and Landa moves in for the kill
and this good farmer edges ever closer to betraying the family he has
bravely hidden, each dramatic beat is another turn of the screw.

Inglourious Basterds has
two major arcs and many entertaining digressions, one of which is the
movie’s pièce de résistance: a furtive meeting in a cellar full of
Nazis that builds and builds and builds until your head feels about to
explode. The film’s most emotional thread features Mélanie Laurent as
Shosanna, the lone Jewish escapee of that farm, who forges a new
identity managing a Paris cinema. That puts a movie marquee at the
action’s heart, with additional chambers for Diane Kruger as a German
leading lady who’s the Basterds’ chief contact (and so much sexier than
she was as Helen of Troy) and Michael Fassbender (who starved himself
as Bobby Sands in Hunger) as a British commando who’s also a
Weimar cinema scholar and (glory be) film critic. (He’s briefed on his
Paris mission by Mike Myers as a pip-pip English general and a gnomish
Rod Taylor as Churchill.) As Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) attempts to
finance his own nationalist German cinema, the Basterds and Shosanna
(on separate tracks) scheme to use his delusions of David O. Selznick
grandeur to send him and Hitler (Martin Wuttke) to that Leni
Riefenstahl mountain in the sky.

I won’t attempt to diagram the narrative, which Tarantino devised over the course of a decade and has the where-the-fuck-did-that-come-from aspect of David Lynch’s mystifying but great Mulholland Drive. (It’s not based on the 1978 war film from which Tarantino borrowed—and cheekily misspelled—the title.) I will say that Inglourious Basterds
builds to a hectic movie-premiere climax in which Shosanna plans to
substitute her own film for a Goebbels-produced one starring Frederick
Zoller (Daniel Brühl), a real Nazi hero recreating onscreen his
valorous feat. So you have a Nazi myth exploded by a subversive Jewish
countermyth contained within a Tarantino revenge myth that rewrites
history in ways that make your jaw drop.

Sadly,
Tarantino isn’t up to that phantasmagorical finale, which carries the
onscreen title “Revenge of the Giant Face.” It’s choppy and labored,
and both the action and Pitt’s performance drift into camp. Yet it gets
by (just) on sheer audacity. Tarantino is nutty enough to believe myth
can trump history—that no Führer can survive the bloody onslaught of an
exploitation auteur. Inglourious Basterds is a revenge movie in which the movie itself is the best revenge.
— David Edelstein